Carlos Sandoval Mextoys

MY FIELD LOGIC

I don't impose structure on my work. I build conditions under which structure can emerge — and then I watch what happens. Form arrives as the result of coordinated behavior between bodies, materials, technologies, and cultural patterns. What looks like composition is often something else: the moment a dynamic system stabilizes, when elements align, diverge, or coexist without anyone having prescribed the result.

I call this Field Logic. In some works it operates through sound, where coordination becomes audible — a shared acoustic field forming between performers who are not directly communicating but are nonetheless arriving somewhere together. In others it unfolds through movement, objects, sensors, or editing decisions, where behavior reveals itself as patterned, automated, or socially conditioned. The question is always the same: how does coherence arise when nobody is fully in charge of it?

When this logic operates through sound specifically, I call it Acoustic Fielding. And when pitch is involved — how groups of people or instruments tune to each other, or fail to — I work with what I call Social-Acoustic Tuning Systems (SATS): a way of understanding pitch not as a fixed property of sound but as an emergent outcome of how people coordinate. Tuning is a condition of the field, not a measure of individual accuracy. It changes depending on scale, density, and the degree of interaction between participants.

Within this framework I distinguish four regimes: Deterministic Systems, where pitch relations are explicitly defined and uniformly stabilized; Lattice Systems, where multiple internally consistent pitch structures coexist without merging; Attractor Systems, where loosely coupled individuals converge toward shared auditory targets without explicit instruction; and Uncoupled Acoustic Fields, where sound coexists without stable relational alignment.

These concepts did not begin as theory. They emerged from practice — from La Pasión según la Gente, where three technicians moved freely through a four-square-kilometre celebration with no predetermined paths; from The Mexican National Anthem, where millions of schoolchildren sing the same melody in a turbulence of frequencies that never resolves into a single pitch; from Biberdamm-Assut, where beavers and musicians produce the same hocket without knowing it; from Maquina Latina, where nested human inaccuracies generate a metronome no machine designed.

I didn't design this framework. I found it — or rather, it found me, while mapping forty years of work I had made without fully knowing what connected it. The curiosity that drove all of it was real, but I couldn't have named its logic while living inside it. Field Logic is what the practice was doing before I had words for it.